Yelling at Trainshttp://yelling-at-trains.org/index.xml
Recent content on Yelling at TrainsHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usMon, 01 Jan 2018 23:45:00 -0600Now this is podracing!http://yelling-at-trains.org/post/now-this-is-podracing/
Mon, 01 Jan 2018 23:45:00 -0600http://yelling-at-trains.org/post/now-this-is-podracing/
<p>Another year, another startup claiming to have solved urban congestion &mdash; this time it&rsquo;s Arrivo, which has announced &ldquo;the end of traffic&rdquo; and dropped a slick video of their vision for travel in the 21st century, involving private vehicles loaded onto maglev pods and rocketed along highway medians at 200 miles per hour. A surfer dude pulls on a wetsuit at Mach 0.25 before we jump-cut to the beach in time for to shed some early morning gnar. A woman smiles in delight as her pod informs her that she has been TSA pre-checked, presumably having automatically disposed of her favorite water bottle for containing too much liquid. There&rsquo;s a tantalizing multimodality to the video; connections to existing transit are emphasized and it appears that some pods can be boarded on foot and linked together like (very) low-occupancy trains. <a href="https://www.producthunt.com/posts/arrivo">On Product Hunt</a> it is described, alas, like &ldquo;if Hyperloop One AND Elon Musk&rsquo;s The Boring Company had a baby.&rdquo; In fact, by inbreeding Ol&rsquo; Musky&rsquo;s two paper-napkin concepts of future mobility they&rsquo;ve managed to extract the worst parts of each: the Hyperloop&rsquo;s uphill battle to productionize maglev technology and the Boring Company&rsquo;s cars-on-a-pod idea with its fundamental capacity constraints.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XwIU4UnJy2o?rel=0" frameborder="0" gesture="media" allow="encrypted-media" class="video" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<figcaption>
My startup idea also involves putting cars on skates, but for a musical extravaganza called <i>The 405 On Ice</i>.
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Startups like Arrivo are fixated the promise that vehicles with enormous top speeds will lead directly to faster travel times in urban areas. This is apparent in their specious claim of a 35-mile journey through Denver in &lt;10 minutes, which is possible only if the vehicle is moving at top speed for the entire journey and accelerates at bone-liquefying rates. Passing off your proposed maximum speed as an average speed to professional journalists is great fun, but how fast your hyper-sled-pods can move is really the less important half of the puzzle.
A related but much more revealing question is: <em>how many pods can you run?</em></p>
<p>For a system that interfaces with an urban street network, the answer turns out to have very little to do with top speed. Arrivo founder Brogan BamBrogan<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:0"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:0">1</a></sup> claims that his proposed network <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/colorado-dot-is-partnering-with-hyperloop-offshoot-to-build-denver-test-track/?comments=1">can carry 20,000 cars where a normal freeway lane could handle 2,900-5,500</a>. Put simply, this estimate is only in the ballpark of accuracy if you ignore the fact that vehicles need to exit the system. Low-occupancy vehicles that merely zip along an infinite highway can be very fast but aren&rsquo;t all that useful; eventually, their occupants want to get somewhere interesting where they can park their vehicle, walk around, and live their lives. In other words, they want to merge into urban traffic. The choke point where your podracing network meets the street where you have to drive yourself around like a pleb will function just like a highway off-ramp (plus a pod unloading stage), and the number of vehicles that can perform this process per hour will ultimately determine how many vehicles can utilize your network.</p>
<figure class="img">
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/podracing.png" alt="Young Anakin Skywalker on his podracer"/>
<figcaption>
Crap, I missed my exit! <a href="https://mygeekblasphemy.com/2016/02/04/im-a-person-and-my-name-is-anakin/">(source)</a>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2 id="laundry-latency-and-lanes">Laundry, latency, and lanes</h2>
<p>When describing systems of all kinds, engineers use the terms <em>throughput</em> and <em>latency</em> to formalize these concepts of effectiveness. Throughput is the total number of items of some kind a system can process &mdash; a transit network&rsquo;s throughput is measured in passengers per hour. Latency is the time it takes for an individual item to be processed, or in our case for an individual to make a journey through a network. I first encountered these terms in a class about computer processor design, which used laundry machines to analogize the concepts. With a single laundry machine, the latency and throughput are simple inversions of each other; the faster the machine finishes a load, the more loads per hour you can run:</p>
<figure class="img img-small">
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/laundry/washer.png" alt="A washing machine with a latency of 0.5 hours has a throughput of two loads per hour"/>
</figure>
<p>But laundry, like traffic, is a process that happens in sequential stages, going from the washer to the dryer before reaching its final destination, a pile on the floor:</p>
<figure class="img img-small">
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/laundry/washer-dryer.png" alt="A washing machine with a latency of 0.5 hours per load has a throughput of 2 loads per hour, and it feeds clothing into a dryer with a latency of 0.75 hours per load and thus a throughput of about 1.33 loads per hour."/>
</figure>
<p>The latency of this kind of system is the <em>sum</em> of the latencies of each stage, and its throughput is the <em>minimum</em> of the throughputs of all the stages. So in the washer-dryer system above, we&rsquo;ll never do better than about 1.33 loads per hour, and the mismatch between the two machines&rsquo; latencies is reflected in a queue of increasingly wrinkled laundry waiting to enter the dryer. Now let&rsquo;s consider the effect of an Arrivo-style proposal to decrease the latency of a single stage:</p>
<figure class="img img-small">
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/laundry/washer-dryer-musky.png" alt="A happy Elon Musk waves a magic wand. A washing machine with a latency of 0.1 hours per load has a throughput of 10 loads per hour, and it feeds clothing into a dryer with a latency of 0.75 hours per load and thus a throughput of about 1.33 loads per hour."/>
</figure>
<p>Since we&rsquo;ve clobbered the latency of this stage, we&rsquo;ve drastically reduced the latency of the entire system, right? Well, no. In the rush to get away from traffic we&rsquo;ve utterly forgotten why it exists in the first place. We don&rsquo;t have highway congestion because the latency of a highway is large; it&rsquo;s because the throughput of the city streets that the highway leads to is capped, leading to a situation more like this:</p>
<figure class="img img-small">
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/laundry/washer-dryer-musky-pileup.png" alt="A frustrated Elon Musk waves a magic wand. A washing machine with a latency of 0.1 hours per load has a throughput of 10 loads per hour, and it feeds clothing into a dryer with a latency of 0.75 hours per load and thus a throughput of about 1.33 loads per hour. But the mismatch in latencies between the two machines causes a pileup of laundry waiting to be put into the dryer."/>
</figure>
<p>No matter how fast we can make these vehicles go and how closely they can follow one another, they can&rsquo;t exit the Arrivo system any more quickly than the urban street grid can accept them, making this system as functionally useful as an extra freeway lane at rush hour (of the kind that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/us/los-angeles-drivers-on-the-405-ask-was-1-6-billion-worth-it.html">increased peak travel latencies in LA</a>). Bounded by the throughput of urban streets running at capacity during rush hour, the Arrivo network will be a very fast trip into a very long queue to get onto the street: the epitome of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g_WWoIePns">&ldquo;showing up early just to wait in line&rdquo;</a>.</p>
<p>The throughput of single-occupancy vehicles in a city quickly brushes up against constraints fundamental to the very purpose of urban planning, which is to create desirable places for people to live their lives. We can&rsquo;t increase the speed at which vehicles travel through the city without making it unsafe for pedestrians. We can&rsquo;t widen roads or build more parking without cutting into space for activites that are valuable in both economic and human terms. These aren&rsquo;t hypotheticals &mdash; we <em>tried</em> doing all of these things in the age of the interstate, rended the fabric of our cities, and are now spending <a href="http://theplan.metro.net/">billions upon billions of dollars</a> to re-apply urban planning principles we had figured out before WWII. With a model that relies on increased throughput of cars through urban spaces, Arrivo endeavours to build a system that grafts technology that is so 21st century that it doesn&rsquo;t even exist yet onto the very worst of 20th century urban planning.</p>
<h2 id="the-part-where-i-tell-you-trains-are-cool">The part where I tell you trains are cool</h2>
<p>In America, we struggle to effectively finance transportation projects built from proven and cost-effective technologies, to say nothing of autonomous maglev pods. Imagining for a second that there was money floating (heh) around to build such a system, the immediately obvious thing to do is close it off from city streets and run high-capacity vehicles, called <em>trains</em> in industry jargon, instead of car-pods. Why?</p>
<ul>
<li><p>By isolating the right-of-way from street traffic entirely, it becomes much easier to reason about the expected throughput of the system, because vehicles don&rsquo;t have to merge &mdash; they just run back and forth<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:1"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:1">2</a></sup>.</p></li>
<li><p>Until the system exceeds &ldquo;crush load&rdquo; capacity where passengers are struggling to board the vehicles, the <em>vehicle</em> throughput has little relation to <em>passenger</em> throughput, which is what we ultimately care about.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>This isn&rsquo;t just a question of access and equity &ndash; it&rsquo;s a business concern, too. If you&rsquo;re operating a maglev network and faced with the choice of running car-pods or trains, the number you&rsquo;re going to be concerned about is the <em>farebox recovery ratio</em>, which describes the percentage of operating costs that are covered by user fees:</p>
<div class="katex" style="text-align:center;font-size:20px">
FRR = \frac{(price \space of \space ride) \times (number \space of \space riders)}{(fixed \space operating \space cost) + (marginal \space rider \space cost) \times (number \space of \space riders)}
</div>
<p>There is no part of this equation that favors car-pods. Farebox recovery is a numbers game &mdash; the more riders the system supports, the less you have to charge each of them for each ride, and roughly speaking, a subway can deposit about an order of maginitude more people into a city at rush hour than a highway lane. The marginal cost of each car-pod rider is huge compared to a train as well. Electricity isn&rsquo;t free, and cars weigh 30-40x what their occupants do and will be proportionally more expensive to transport. Then there&rsquo;s the fixed operating cost of maintaining a fleet of many more car-pods than will saturate the network so that they can roam the streets looking for passengers. With a tiny capacity compared to a metro and much higher operating and marginal costs, riders would be looking at paying 10-30x the cost of a subway ride to match the farebox recovery ratios of American subway lines &ndash; for instance, Boston&rsquo;s Red Line operates at or over capacity every rush hour and still operates at a loss <a href="http://carmensunion589.org/2015/04/is-gov-bakers-special-panel-evaluating-the-mbta-fai/">with an FRR of 60%</a><sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:2"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:2">3</a></sup>.</p>
<p>I could be wrong! I often am! Demand for such a service could soar, allowing the operator to charge truly exorbitant rates and make a profit on operations. I wouldn&rsquo;t be surprised if there were a few thousand people who would pay $200 to shave a few minutes off of their commute through Manhattan every rush hour, but I doubt there are many who take Colorado&rsquo;s E-470 toll road ringing Denver, where the initial Arrivo segment is proposed. Moreover, I can&rsquo;t emphasize enough that none of this has anything to do with the unknowably high capital cost of actually constructing such a network, which must either be offset by further increases in fares or justified as a public expenditure, as we do for proposals that represent a public good. Arrivo will bear neither. No government should commit funding for it, and no investor in their right mind would expect a return on its construction.</p>
<p>As much as I have written a few thousand words ragging on Arrivo, I would really like the Silicon Valley set to make a serious contribution to the problems of urban transit. But where the Boring Company is at least trying to lower tunneling costs, which is a win for effective mass transit as well as whatever Elon has verbal government approval to build today, Arrivo offers nothing to advance the conversation about urban congestion. The technology they&rsquo;re chasing may have enormous value and I wish them all the best in developing it, but it would hardly be worse at &ldquo;ending traffic&rdquo; if their proposed maglev lanes featured a Hot Wheels loop-de-loop in the middle. We don&rsquo;t need a bunch of guys in a kitschy LA garage-office to tell us that shooting large vehicles on top of larger vehicles down a magnetic track is cool as hell, but won&rsquo;t solve urban congestion. There&rsquo;s a Silicon Valley truism that &ldquo;those who say it can&rsquo;t be done should get out of the way of those who are doing it&rdquo;<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:3"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:3">4</a></sup>. My blog that no one reads will not get in Arrivo&rsquo;s way, but I hope they take a moment to think about, and perhaps reframe in light of well-known constraints, what it is they are actually doing.</p>
<p><em>Image sources: <a href="https://www.disneyclips.com/imagesnewb3/cinderella-fairygodmother.html">fairy godmother</a>, <a href="https://thenounproject.com/lokamariella/collection/laundry-clothes/?oq=laundry&amp;cidx=5">Loka Mariella&rsquo;s laundry icons</a>, and <a href="https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=timer&amp;i=1015760">Gregor Cresnar&rsquo;s timer icon</a>. Thanks!</em></p>
<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:0">Hate the name if you want but the story of how he got it is <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-hyperloop-founder-brogan-bambrogan-got-the-greatest-name-ever-2016-5">kind of adorable</a>.
<a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:0"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
<li id="fn:1">This is a simplification even for simple branching transit systems and a pleasant fantasy for a system like New York&rsquo;s, but even the most complicated subway system is a tractable network to analyze compared to even a modest urban street network.
<a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:1"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
<li id="fn:2">It&rsquo;s true that a fixed operating cost absent from the car-pod model compared to Boston&rsquo;s is the salary of train operators. But any high-capacity train on Arrivo&rsquo;s maglev would be fully automated.
<a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:2"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
<li id="fn:3">It seems that those who say it <em>shouldn&rsquo;t</em> be done are often asked kindly to get out of the way as well.
<a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:3"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
</ol>
</div>
Closing the gap, opening the region: the North-South Rail Linkhttp://yelling-at-trains.org/post/nsrl/
Sat, 11 Nov 2017 21:50:58 -0800http://yelling-at-trains.org/post/nsrl/
<p>Imagine for a moment that your city lacked a highway network entirely. Instead, it had a series of ordinary two-lane streets in place of Interstates X, Y, and Z, each with massively wide turns and hundreds of feet of totally undeveloped grassland on each side &ndash; in short, everything that a highway implies except the pavement. The roads don&rsquo;t connect downtown, but lo, there is an <em>pre-excavated</em> tunnel under the city center that we can use to connect the roadways. There would be no debate about whether to build highways on this land. It would have unanimous political support. You and I would be sleeping in hard hats and driving backhoes around right now racing to get this project done last week.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;d like to suggest that Boston&rsquo;s existing MBTA Commuter Rail is quite like these massively underused interstates-to-be. Its 398 miles already cover massive distances and carry about 100,000 daily riders<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:1"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> to many of its outlying communities, but with sparse train schedules that barely scratch the surface of their amazing potential. Adding capacity to a railway doesn&rsquo;t much resemble adding lanes to a highway &ndash; rather than adding parallel tracks, it means buying better vehicles, improving stations, and running more trains. Just like our hypothetical roadways, the Commuter Rail is split into two entirely disconnected halves terminating about 1.5 miles apart and branching out in opposite directions from North and South Stations. But luckily, there is nothing metaphorical about the pre-excavated tunnel under the city. During the Big Dig, we cleared a path between North and South Station of all kinds of utilities and spooky archaelogical surprises, and filled it with loose earth, waiting for Boston to regain its appetite for tunneling and connect the region in one fell swoop with a project we call the North-South Rail Link.</p>
<figure class="img-large">
<a href="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/mbta-cr.png">
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/mbta-cr.png"/>
</a>
<figcaption>
Stare into the abyss that is the 1.5 mile gap between North and South Stations, the termini of the extensive purple Commuter Rail network pictured here. Click for the a better view. (Source: <a href="https://mbta.org">MBTA</a>)
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Just from a glance at our subway map, the benefit of the North-South Rail Link (NSRL) is evident. Getting from North to South Station requires two, count &lsquo;em, two subway transfers, making commuting into and then out of Boston on the Commuter Rail the kind of journey Tolkien wrote about. You can imagine that almost nobody does this, and that this service gap contributes to Greater Boston&rsquo;s north-south cultural divide. On its face, digging a tunnel between North and South Station offers some clear advantages over the existing network&rsquo;s structure:</p>
<ul>
<li>Commuters can ride the Commuter Rail clear across the city and access jobs that would be otherwise impractical to reach by transit, and a pain to reach by car.</li>
<li>MBTA operations become a lot more efficient, since the trains and equipment belonging to the two halves of the network are no longer isolated from each other.</li>
<li>The ride from North to South Station would become faster even for people travelling within downtown.</li>
</ul>
<p>But with <a href="https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/rappaport/files/NSRL%20White%20Paper_Silver_Final.pdf">a price tag between $4 and $6 billion</a> kindly estimated by the wicked smaaht folks up at Harvard, it&rsquo;s crucial to understand that rationale for building the Link goes way beyond getting commuters from North to South Station &ndash; it&rsquo;s about enabling a better kind of rail service on the strong skeleton the Commuter Rail provides. When a small but growing group of NSRL advocates like Congressman Seth Moulton say that <a href="https://moulton.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/NEC-Slide-Deck-.pdf">the project would add <em>100,000 new daily trips</em></a> to Boston&rsquo;s rail network, this is what they have in mind. This vision is hard to compare to any existing system in the United States, but far from being a new idea, it falls into a well-established pattern of rail service in Europe and Asia. So to really understand why Boston should build the NSRL, let&rsquo;s book the cheapest WOW! Airlines flight we can find<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:0"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:0">2</a></sup> and make our way to the transit Mecca of Berlin, Germany.</p>
<h2 id="an-old-new-kind-of-rail-system">An old, new kind of rail system</h2>
<p>Assuming your WOW! flight ever gets off the ground, you won&rsquo;t get far in Berlin before spotting this practical, unfussy map of its rail network:</p>
<figure class="img-large">
<a href="http://www.mappery.com/maps/Berlin-Transit-Map.jpg">
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/berlin.jpg"/>
</a>
<figcaption>
Berlin's rail system. If you're not big on squinting you can click for a better view (and the source).
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>&ldquo;God damn&rdquo;</em>, you say loudly, outing yourself immediately as an American tourist. <em>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a big subway system!&rdquo;</em> It turns out you&rsquo;re about half right. While the subway, or <em>U-Bahn</em>, is fairly extensive, most of the lines on this map are an altogether different system called the <em>S-Bahn</em>. This network extends farther outside of the city and stops less often than the subway. But beyond that, it&rsquo;s pretty similar &ndash; it runs electrified trains, uses tunnels downtown, works with the same fare system, and, especially on the central &ldquo;trunk&rdquo; where many lines converge, has frequencies that rival the U-Bahn. The experience of catching an S-Bahn train isn&rsquo;t fundamentally different than riding the subway, which is reflected in this map that makes them hard to tell apart. This blurring of lines between rapid transit and regional rail is crucial to enabling the walkable communities that Europe is known for, and is exactly what we should be attempting to do with the MBTA Commuter Rail.</p>
<figure class="img">
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/sprockets.jpg"/>
<figcaption>
Now is the time on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHZR9SA5pOg">Sprockets</a> where we modernize our regional rail network!
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>&ldquo;Pshaw&rdquo;</em>, you reply, between mouthfuls of currywurst, <em>&ldquo;That May Work In Those Countries, But It Would Never Fly Over Here™!&rdquo;</em> Yet Greater Boston has all the ingredients required to support a Berlin-style regional network. Many outlying towns in the area predate archetypical car-oriented American suburbs by centuries, and have a walkable and mixed-use core ideal for increased transit frequency. Places like Waltham and Salem already have vibrant downtown areas and are building high-density, transit-oriented housing near the commuter rail even in the absence of any major improvements to the system. Introducing respectable train frequencies into these systems would kick off a virtuous cycle of more walkable development, more housing, and more commuting options for everyone, all of which would make my stupid lefty heart swell with pride, but more importantly would massively expand the list of places with frequent transit service to Boston and relieve our housing market.</p>
<figure class="img">
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/indigo-line.jpg"/>
<figcaption>
The NSRL would be an effective way to provide rapid-transit like service on Commuter Rail tracks, as proposed in MassDOT's slapdash "Indigo Line" scheme. (this bizarrely cropped image via <a href="http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/01/09/massdot-capital-plan-proposal/">Boston Magazine</a>)
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For some of these communities adjacent to the Commuter Rail system, an upgrade is <em>long</em> overdue. The Fairmont Line runs through dense and transit-dependent areas of Boston that would massively benefit from more frequent service. The Newburyport/Rockport runs through working-class areas of Chelsea and Lynn, where recent immigrants and longtime residents alike struggle to efficiently commute to their jobs in Boston. The new Boston Landing stop and coming West Station on the Framingham/Worcester line, if served frequently enough, would bring rapid transit to areas of Allston served either reluctantly or not at all by the Green Line. The benefits would extend even to people who commute strictly within the city, as the new service pattern would effectively create a new subway line for downtown Boston, allowing riders to travel between North Station, South Station, and Back Bay with unprecedented ease and relieving stress from overcrowded transfer stations. In a growing city, the alternative to this solution is not &ldquo;do nothing&rdquo; &ndash; if we don&rsquo;t upgrade the Commuter Rail, we&rsquo;ll need to find other, more expensive solutions to serve these areas properly.</p>
<h2 id="capacity-for-the-next-century-not-decade">Capacity for the next century, not decade</h2>
<p>Even understanding the benefits that S-Bahn style service would provide to Greater Boston, but it&rsquo;s fair to ask why we need the NSRL to enable this &ndash; can&rsquo;t we just run trains more frequently on existing tracks? It turns out that while we could run more trains than we do today, the shape of our current network makes it impossible to scale up to true Euro-style regional rail. There are many reasons why Commuter Rail trains run infrequently, in particular the cost of staffing, but the biggest problem is that you can only fit so many trains into a complex terminal like North or South Station (what we&rsquo;d call a &ldquo;stub-end&rdquo;) at a time. Movement into and out of a stub-end platform must be done slowly, and in practice about 30% of train movement in these stations is made by trains entering or exiting service, not carrying passengers. The pace of movements through a railyard would best be described as &ldquo;trundling&rdquo;, and so the last few hundred yards of an inbound Commuter Rail trip seem to take up a disproportionate amount of time.</p>
<figure class="img">
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/deadheads.jpg"/>
<figcaption>
Moving passenger trains without carrying passengers is known in the industry as "deadheading", but is unfortunately best done outside the influence of psychedelic drugs. (<a href="http://blog.urbanoutfitters.com/blog/deadhead_fashion">Photo source, but attribution information unavailable</a>)
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Determined as ever to sorta kinda do the right thing, the MBTA is currently planning the South Station Expansion (SSX) project to add seven new tracks to South Station at the cost of about $2 billion. This project would replace the existing Post Office building along the Fort Point Channel to increase the capacity of (half of) the Commuter Rail system. This is a fix to our capacity problem in the same way that <em>Pimp My Ride</em> was a fix for many a barely-functioning Pontiac Grand Am. <em>&ldquo;Yo, I hear you like trains&rdquo;</em>, Xzibit gushes, bursting on set in striped overalls and a railroad engineer&rsquo;s cap, <em>&ldquo;so we put even more trains on your incredibly valuable waterfront real estate!&rdquo;</em> Instead of fixing the underlying problem of train movement and storage, we&rsquo;ll quickly run up against South Station&rsquo;s expanded capacity in a decade or two, only this time with nowhere to expand to. By contrast, connecting North and South stations removes the stub-end bottleneck, allowing commuter trains to pass through the core of the system and terminate somewhere on a branch line in response to demand.</p>
<figure class="img">
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/ssx.png"/>
<figcaption>
The very uncool SSX we're planning versus the totally radical SSX that should be built on the waterfront instead.
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There are some secondary improvements that the a well-planned NSRL would enable as well. Like your toothbrush, any trains that run through the Link would have to run on electric power rather than diesel due to the problem of ventilating toxic fumes. This means they would accelerate faster and reach their destinations more quickly than the existing locomotives. Retrofitting all platforms to permit level boarding (aligning platform and train heights to eliminate flip-out boarding staircases) would reduce the duration and improve the predictability of stops, since passengers with limited mobility would find embarking and alighting much easier. Electric trains don&rsquo;t have a locomotive pushing or pulling the trainset &ndash; instead, each car has its own onboard propulsion drawing from an overheard wire or third rail &ndash; which means it&rsquo;s much easier to configure smaller sets of cars together for off-peak service, <a href="http://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/2017/06/frequent-trains-off-peak.html">as will be possible with the new vehicles coming to Caltrain</a> that will carry thousands of passengers and their loud phone conversations about their startup&rsquo;s top-secret IP up and down Silicon Valley.</p>
<p>The cost savings of short dwell times, sharing equipment system-wide, and being able to flexibly decouple, route and terminate trains will quicky add up. A <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/561e6ed5e4b039248a6a94aa/t/5646a941e4b0a4a3eef11385/1447471425380/NSRL+Tech+Report+No.5-Operations+Study.pdf">1995 study</a> suggested that building the NSRL could save the MBTA about $140 million (2017 dollars) in annual operating costs <sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:2"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:2">3</a></sup>. Most importantly, they will no longer have to drag trainsets loudly past my old house at three in the morning on the lone Cambridge freight track that connects the two halves of the system. Before it&rsquo;s too late, Boston and the MBTA need to figure out what <a href="http://www.northsouthraillink.org/comp-proj-overview/">dozens of cities</a> around the world have long-since learned &ndash; nothing provides capacity or operational flexibility like running trains <em>through</em> the urban core.</p>
<h2 id="organization-electronics-and-concrete">Organization, electronics, <em>and</em> concrete</h2>
<p>Knowing what we know about the Germans, you probably won&rsquo;t be surprised to learn that they have a pithy and pragmatic expression encapsulating their philosophy behind running trains. <em>Organisation vor Elektronik vor Beton</em> (&ldquo;Organization before Electronics before Concrete&rdquo;) is not just the name of my industrial rock project but a maxim that serves as a kind of checklist<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:3"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:3">4</a></sup> for transit planners deciding what kinds of investments to make:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>First, improve your <em>organization</em>: schedules, routes, and policies, to be as efficient as they possibly can be.</p></li>
<li><p>Then, ugrade your <em>electronics</em>: fare collection, power, train control, signaling, and communication systems to get the most bang for your buck from the existing track-miles of service.</p></li>
<li><p>Once you&rsquo;ve maxed out these other strategies, and only then, should you spend money on <em>concrete</em>: new tracks, bridges, tunnels, etc.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>These are listed in increasing order of cost &ndash; improving organization will often <a href="http://amateurplanner.blogspot.com/2016/09/a-single-letter-costs-t-23-million.html">net a transit agency some savings</a>, while building new track miles is a multibillion dollar affair these days. That&rsquo;s why the NSRL must be viewed as a <em>platform</em> for better organization and electronics, not just an expensive piece of concrete. The tunnel itself is crucial, but planning for every other part of the new system should begin before we break ground. The current fare collection system, whereby a conductor checks everyone&rsquo;s ticket (or tries to) needs to be replaced by pay-on-platform. Negotiation with operator&rsquo;s unions needs to begin far ahead of time, so we&rsquo;re not overstaffing modern trains just to comply with union regulations. At a system level, we should decide early what kinds of service patterns to implement and what level of service the stakeholder communities will receive, and make some tough decisions about routing. There are simply more branches running from South Station than North Station, so certain trains will still terminate in the surface yards of these stations.</p>
<figure class="img-large">
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/nsrl-hardly.jpg"/>
<figcaption>
Diagrams like this one showing the Link sprouting a half-dozen 'color lines' into existence are a bit...aspirational, but they make for great PR. If you want to learn more about the practicalities of developing train schedules, spend some time with the level 9 transit nerds of the <a href="http://www.archboston.org/community/showthread.php?t=1089">ArchBoston forums</a>.
(<a href="http://www.northsouthraillink.org/">Source via Citizens for the North South Rail Link</a>)
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>With a concrete-only mindset, there is a real danger that we could spend many billions on the Link and never use it to its full potential. Such a thing has happened in Philidelphia, which built its Center City Commuter Connection to solve a suspiciously similar problem in the 1980s. While the network is extensive, connected, and fully electrified, <a href="https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/philadelphia-rail-septa-great-people-problem">myopic management and staffing practices have prevented the system from even approaching its maximum service frequencies</a>. If we&rsquo;re not commuted to running a North-South Rail Linked MBTA in a way that respects the size of the investment, we should forgo building it and continue writing a wistful Globe op-ed or two per year about the project instead. But I want to believe that we won&rsquo;t back down from the challenge.</p>
<h2 id="could-this-really-happen">Could this really happen?</h2>
<p>Yes, but our window of opportunity is closing &ndash; if we go through with South Station Expansion, the political will to invest billions in the Commuter Rail will dry up for a few decades. At that point, there&rsquo;s a realistic chance that new construction will have blocked the underground pathway between North and South Station, permanently preventing a link between the stations (also, it&rsquo;ll mean that I&rsquo;ll probably be dead before the damn thing is finished). Money is, you know, a factor. The $4-6bn for the Link itself and another cool billion or two for new rail cars, branch electrification, and station moderization, are going to have to come from somewhere. But a project that touches such a wide swathe of the Boston area, adds so much ridership to the system, and nets us a new high-capacity transit line downtown could draw support and funding from a wide network of communities and government agencies. Especially when viewed as an alternative to South Station Expansion, it&rsquo;s a startlingly cost-effective investment.</p>
<p>The North-South Rail Link may be unique among United States transit proposals in its ability to transform not just a corridor or a city but an entire region, commiting us to a more equitable and connected version of the urban fabric that makes the Boston area such a wonderful place to be. Opportunities like this are like off-peak Commuter Rail trains &ndash; they don&rsquo;t come often, and we&rsquo;re not going to want to wait around for the next one.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1"><a href="http://amateurplanner.blogspot.com/2017/03/how-many-people-use-commuter-rail-more.html">Indeed, the system carries 42% of commuters at the peak of Boston&rsquo;s rush hour.</a>
<a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:1"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
<li id="fn:0">I really recommend that you do not do this.
<a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:0"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
<li id="fn:2"><a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/561e6ed5e4b039248a6a94aa/t/5646a941e4b0a4a3eef11385/1447471425380/NSRL+Tech+Report+No.5-Operations+Study.pdf">Check out table EX-3 on page EX-10</a>. Or don&rsquo;t &ndash; I&rsquo;m a footnote, not a cop.
<a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:2"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
<li id="fn:3"><em>OVEVB</em> an interesting way to gauge American transit projects, like your local streetcar to nowhere. If you read about a project in your area that doesn&rsquo;t follow these principles, be sure to write an angry letter in German to the planning agency and they&rsquo;ll probably be obligated to publish it in the public comments section of their environmental impact report.
<a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:3"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
</ol>
</div>
Boston's Red-Blue Connector is about fixing the core systemhttp://yelling-at-trains.org/post/red-blue/
Mon, 05 Jun 2017 12:49:42 -0500http://yelling-at-trains.org/post/red-blue/<p>When transit advocates in Boston call for expansions of the T, the response from MassDOT and Governor Baker is that we first need to <a href="http://www.mass.gov/governor/press-office/press-releases/fy2017/update-on-mbta-reforms-and-winter-resiliency-upgrades.html">focus on fixing the core system</a> &mdash; making sure that the vehicles, stations, and track we already have can operate at maximum efficiency. While this can sometimes feel like a &ldquo;shove off, we don&rsquo;t have the money&rdquo;, it&rsquo;s a pragmatic stance, and to their credit, the MBTA is actually in the middle of a push for such investment, with orders for new Red and Orange Line cars <a href="http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2017/03/take_a_tour_of_the_mock_up_of.html">in the works</a> and improved signaling and winterization schemes in the pipeline. By and large, prioritizing maintenance over expansion is a sound principle and I am not here to challenge it. Instead, I want to dig a bit deeper into the assumptions made when dichotomizing capital investments into &ldquo;expansion&rdquo; versus &ldquo;maintenance&rdquo;. Broadly speaking:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><strong>Expansion</strong> means new revenue service to new places, adding new transit users to the system and putting additional stress on existing infrastructure. We can&rsquo;t &ldquo;do&rdquo; expansion right now because it would be unsustainable and irresponsible to redirect resources to new parts of the system when existing ones are not being adequately maintained.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Maintenance</strong> means making investments that will allow us to more effectively use the infrastructure we already have. It means updating outdated technologies like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_signalling#Fixed_block">fixed block signalling</a> that doesn&rsquo;t take advantage of modern communication systems and fixing historic mistakes (oh god the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Line_(MBTA)#/media/File:Longwood_MBTA_station,_Brookline_MA.jpg">Type 8&rsquo;s</a>) that have caused inefficiency to creep into the system over time. Generally speaking this means not adding new riders <em>per se</em>, although it might increase the overall capacity of the system. Capital investment in this category must be ongoing and sustainable, and we have a lot of backlog here to slog through before we can think about &ldquo;expansion&rdquo;. Specific examples include: modernizing signaling systems, replacing rolling stock, cleaning and modernizing stations, etc.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>This distinction has found its way into a lot of discussion over transit investment in Boston and other cities with legacy systems. I wish to pose the question of whether a project might exist that is incorrectly categorized as reckless expansion when it actually lives much closer on the spectrum to &ldquo;sound maintenance&rdquo; projects like new signaling systems and the Government Center overhaul. I think the Red-Blue connector is such a project.</p>
<figure >
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/missing-blue-segment.png" alt="The distance between Bowdoin, the Blue Line&#39;s current terminus, and the Charles/MGH Red Line station. Let&#39;s all stare at this image and collectively will the black segment into existence." />
<figcaption>
<p>
The distance between Bowdoin, the Blue Line&#39;s current terminus, and the Charles/MGH Red Line station. Let&#39;s all stare at this image and collectively will the black segment into existence.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The fact that the Red and Blue lines don&rsquo;t connect, even though the Blue Line terminates about 2,000 feet from Charles/MGH, is a head-scratcher for tourists, frustration for commuters, and increasingly, a bottleneck on the capacity of our core subway system. Though the state was made to study the option as a Big Dig mitigation project, it was deemed too expensive and shelved, though the $750 million price tag given by MassDOT is for an <a href="http://amateurplanner.blogspot.com/2016/09/how-massdot-stacks-deck-red-blue-edition_7.html">absurdly over-engineered version</a> that would make it the most expensive piece of subway per mile in the nation.</p>
<p>Whatever the actual price of construction, the cost of ignoring Red-Blue is becoming increasingly apparent as our core stations groan under the weight of over 100,000 daily transfers<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:This-is-the-tota"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:This-is-the-tota">1</a></sup>. Because of its absence, commuters treat the existing downtown transfer stations as a sort of superstation where the Green and Orange lines serve as a glorified moving walkway<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:Hong-Kong-has-an"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:Hong-Kong-has-an">2</a></sup> to get between Red and Blue platforms. The increased footfall puts stress on stations like Park Street and Government Center and overcrowds the barely adequate Red, Green, and Orange line cars while the Blue Line cruises around far under capacity downtown. This crowding has ripple effects throughout the system; at a Kendall Square Mobility Task Force meeting I attended (awkwardly sat in the back of and ate four oatmeal cookies) it was mentioned that the <a href="https://www.cambridgema.gov/cdd/projects/transportation/~/media/C7942C92FA4B4551B7DD54B1D831CE5B.ashx">variability of train dwell times at Park Street is a primary bottleneck for throughput on the Red Line</a>. Extending the Blue Line about half a mile would improve the capacity of every other subway line in the system by better balancing the flow of downtown commuters throughout existing stations. <em>It lets us use our existing infrastructure more effectively</em> &mdash; sounds familiar, no?</p>
<figure >
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/blue-line-shirt.png" alt="I want this on a shirt, but no one will print it for me because trademarks" />
<figcaption>
<p>
I want this on a shirt, but no one will print it for me because trademarks
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A Red-Blue transfer is not a &ldquo;would be nice someday&rdquo; like the North-South Rail Link or a Green Line connection to the Seaport. It&rsquo;s not even an I Can&rsquo;t Believe It&rsquo;s Not Built Yet™ in the same vein as the Blue Line to Lynn. The fact that these two lines don&rsquo;t connect is a fundamental shortcoming of the topology of our subway network. When Governor Baker and the Fiscal and Managment Control Board triage the problems that the MBTA faces today, the Red-Blue connector needs to be bucketed not with other subway extensions, but with issues like vehicle procurement and signaling upgrades, and maybe just a notch below &ldquo;the trains are literally on fire&rdquo;. It&rsquo;s an embarrassment that deserves our full attention the moment the Green Line Extension checks clear.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:This-is-the-tota">This is the total number of Red-Green and Red-Orange transfers as given at the bottom of page 16 of the <a href="http://www.mbta.com/uploadedfiles/documents/2014%20BLUEBOOK%2014th%20Edition(1).pdf">2014 MBTA Blue Book.</a> <a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:This-is-the-tota"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
<li id="fn:Hong-Kong-has-an">Hong Kong has an actual moving walkway between its adjacent Central and Admiralty stations, and it&rsquo;s pretty cool. I have been told by folks at the T that an equivalent connector between State Street and Downtown Crossing is probably impossible due to the geometry of the stations. <a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:Hong-Kong-has-an"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
</ol>
</div>
Disrupt Kendall Square!http://yelling-at-trains.org/post/disrupt-kendall/
Wed, 22 Feb 2017 11:00:00 -0500http://yelling-at-trains.org/post/disrupt-kendall/
<p>A few weeks ago, my MIT inbox dinged with a piece of exciting news &mdash; President Reif announced that the university has secured the rights to redevelop a huge part of adjacent Kendall Square that is currently owned by the US Department of Transportation. Kendall is the epicenter of Cambridge&rsquo;s tech community and even if you spend as much time pounding down overpriced quinoa bowls there as I do, you may not be aware that the USDOT&rsquo;s Volpe Center research facility is tucked right behind the Marriott on Broadway, in an imposing but mostly nondescript building that you can&rsquo;t get into without a passport and a blood sample. This is a huge opportunity &mdash; maybe our last opportunity &mdash; to start building a real neighborhood out of what could currently be better described as a gleaming pileup of biotech buildings. MIT treasurer Israel Ruiz laid out MIT&rsquo;s broad vision in <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2017/3q-israel-ruiz-investment-volpe-center-0118">an interview with MIT News</a> where, perhaps in an attempt to spot-fix a game of Silicon Valley buzzword bingo, he used the phrase &ldquo;innovation ecosystem&rdquo; five times in the space of three questions.</p>
<figure >
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/middle-out.png" alt="Pictured: MIT trying to figure out how many times it can fit the word &#39;innovate&#39; into a single press release" />
<figcaption>
<p>
Pictured: MIT trying to figure out how many times it can fit the word &#39;innovate&#39; into a single press release
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So&hellip;startups, accelerators, hacker lofts&hellip;more of the same, huh? And yet, snark aside, there&rsquo;s evidence here and elsewhere that MIT is seriously committed to transforming Kendall a complete place to work and live. In the same interview, Ruiz asserted:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our engagement with the Volpe property will allow us to further contribute to the vibrancy of the Kendall Square area &mdash; which will provide long-term benefits for our neighbors, for the city, and for the Institute itself. Our work with the Volpe parcel will contribute to an even more exciting Kendall Square for members of the broader community to live and work.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For those who have visited Kendall and its fellow squares on the Red Line (Central, Harvard, Porter, and Davis), it&rsquo;s easy to sense the vibrancy that, by comparison, MIT feels Kendall missing. But this is so hard to quantify &mdash; what makes a neighborhood <em>vibrant</em>, anyway? Rooftop bars? Old people feeding birds? It&rsquo;s something you know when you see; difficult to create in a laboratory like the Seaport, but all too easy to bulldoze over in a place like Boston&rsquo;s old West End. Vibrancy is the surprising sights and interactions that are hallmarks of life in the city, something offbeat in a lockstep world. The places that best fit this description are those that not only attract people from all walks of life, they give them an opportunity to add something of their own. Can MIT pull this off in Kendall Square? How badly does it want to? While I recognize that MIT wants both a return on its investment and to solidify Kendall as an &ldquo;innovation hub&rdquo;, I hope they won&rsquo;t forget that in a place made of concrete, glass, and venture capital, the most disruptive additions might be simple, unassuming, and human.</p>
<figure >
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/kendall-primer.png" alt="A quick geographic primer. Depending on who you ask, the Kendall neighborhood is roughly the area east of Portland St and north of Main St. In yellow (bottom) is the bulk of MIT&#39;s campus. In blue (right) is the future MIT development on Main St. In red (top), the Volpe parcel in question. In green (far left) is a pair of public housing developments marking the transition from biotech buildings to a mostly residential area between Kendall and Central Square. The Charles River (right) separates Cambridge and Boston." />
<figcaption>
<p>
A quick geographic primer. Depending on who you ask, the Kendall neighborhood is roughly the area east of Portland St and north of Main St. In yellow (bottom) is the bulk of MIT&#39;s campus. In blue (right) is the future MIT development on Main St. In red (top), the Volpe parcel in question. In green (far left) is a pair of public housing developments marking the transition from biotech buildings to a mostly residential area between Kendall and Central Square. The Charles River (right) separates Cambridge and Boston.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="http://news.mit.edu/2017/agreement-redevelop-volpe-center-kendall-square-0118">Per the press release</a>, MIT will build a new four-acre building for USDOT on the 14-acre property and following this will have the other ten acres to reshape in its image. Doing this right won&rsquo;t be easy, but it will be well-informed by the <a href="http://www.cambridgema.gov/cdd/projects/planning/k2c2">K2/C2</a> study done by Cambridge and MIT in 2013 to evaluate the future of Central and Kendall Squares. Even now, MIT is preparing to <a href="http://kendallsquare.mit.edu/">redevelop a huge part of Main Street</a> with a half-dozen or so mixed-use buildings, which will make a big impact on the neighborhood well before the Volpe parcel sees serious work. It&rsquo;s also important to note that this property is a $750 million investment on MIT&rsquo;s part, so it will be paying taxes on the property and trying to put things there that will make it money, presumably so it can tear up and re-sod all of its grass a few more times each year.</p>
<p>With all that said, I&rsquo;d like to outline a few of my own thoughts about how to make Kendall Square a more interesting, functional, and inclusive <em>place</em>. So without further ado, here&rsquo;s a listicle called &ldquo;10 Crazy Things MIT Can Do To #Disrupt Kendall Square&rdquo;:</p>
<h1 id="1-human-scale-streetscapes">1. Human-scale streetscapes</h1>
<p>Kendall is notorious for its buildings that look nice from a distance, but offer nothing to passers-by besides views into their spotless lobbies and abstract LED art installed to comply with development regulations requiring <em>something</em> at street-level. The result is that the streets around these buildings are windswept and uninviting, particularly Broadway and Binney, and become non-places that people hurry though instead of lingering in. This isn&rsquo;t true everywhere in Kendall, nor is it a problem that Volpe can solve on its own, but while what ultimately goes up there will probably be glassy and imposing, MIT should still carve out some space for a larger number of smaller, street-facing shops. Another thing that makes Kendall circa 2017 so imposing is the length of certain blocks &mdash; for instance, the 1,000 feet of Main Street on the edge of campus has no cross-cuts onto adjacent Broadway except through a hotel lobby. Perhaps a new street<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:1-I-am-being-tol"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:1-I-am-being-tol">1</a></sup> could bisect the current Volpe parcel.</p>
<figure>
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/binney.png"/>
<figcaption>
This looks like a nice place for nothing to happen ever.
<a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@42.366014,-71.0855289,3a,75y,46.4h,98.18t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1szoO1qbSpY_NmjWMwDC94eg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656">Source via Google Maps</a>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h1 id="2-plant-life">2. Plant life</h1>
<p>Some of my fellow humans tell me that green space is another nice thing to have in a neighborhood. Kendall isn&rsquo;t the grassiest place in the world, but it does have a few patches here and there; the square of grass in front of the Marriot is actually quite nice, especially if you like being surround on all sides by pigeons. The greenest place in the neighborhood is actually the existing Volpe parcel, which is too bad because there&rsquo;s currently a big fence and armed federal employees preventing anyone from having a picnic or tossing the proverbial disk there. Though MIT will certainly reduce the total amount of grass in the parcel, leaving any of it accessible to the public would be a net win, especially if they can create a park-like space with a distinguishing landmark, like a water fountain, public art, or performance space. The Rose Kennedy greenway over in Boston presents a successful example of how to create an an effective oasis of green surrounded by slow but persistent traffic on all sides, and could serve as a model for MIT to emulate.</p>
<figure>
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/rk-greenway.jpg"/>
<figcaption>
Parts of the Greenway close to South Station use foliage nicely to buffer the green space from traffic on both sides.
<a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/style/2014/06/24/public-art-blooming-rose-fitzgerald-kennedy-greenway/9do1T0KAxFeUhCujbadAyK/story.html">Source via The Boston Globe</a>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h1 id="3-let-them-eat-something-other-than-cake">3. Let them eat something other than cake</h1>
<p>Where Kendall Square does have anything at sidewalk level, it caters mostly to the immediate needs employees of the area, offering organic lunch options, wine bars, and inexplicably a chain of two coffee shops called Tatte within spitting distance of each other. There&rsquo;s nothing wrong with upscale dining, but that&rsquo;s almost literally all Kendall has, which is apparent in those rare instances where you need a toothbrush or a dozen eggs but not a $15 Moscow mule. This unfulfillment of basic life needs affects people who live in Kendall proper, one of the more residential areas nearby, or even in MIT housing. For instance, here&rsquo;s what Google Maps shows for grocery stores in the area:</p>
<figure >
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/no-grocery-stores.png" alt="They don&#39;t want you to eat." />
<figcaption>
<p>
They don&#39;t want you to eat.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The nearest grocery stores, running the gamut on scale and price, all seem to form a ring set back a mile or so from Kendall, as if some mad scientist at Biogen accidentally created a force field that only repels fresh produce. Compare this situation to the Back Bay and West End areas, screenshotted below. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison (note that the scales are different and arbitrary) but to show that this is not the norm even in pricey areas across the river.</p>
<figure >
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/grocery-stores.png" alt="Stay tuned for my next post about how Kendall needs an &#39;adult bakery&#39;" />
<figcaption>
<p>
Stay tuned for my next post about how Kendall needs an &#39;adult bakery&#39;
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Kendall is basically a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert">food desert</a>, a term more commonly associated with impoverished neighborhoods than the biotech capital of the East Coast. If a regular grocery store is too boring for MIT, this might be a fun place for a semi-enclosed farmer&rsquo;s market, or something like Minneapolis&rsquo; <a href="http://www.midtownglobalmarket.org/">Midtown Global Market</a> which showcases cuisines from around the world. Or MIT can build the grocery store of the future, featuring the latest in hydroponics technology, interactive displays on nutrition and food sourcing, and some Amazon Go-style AI where the store automatically rings out your items as you take them off the shelf and also admonishes you for not buying the healthier soy sauce.</p>
<figure >
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/hal.jpg" alt="I&#39;m sorry Dave, do you have *any idea* how much sodium is in that thing?" />
<figcaption>
<p>
I&#39;m sorry Dave, do you have *any idea* how much sodium is in that thing?
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The same goes for pharmacies, convenience stores, maybe a pizza joint. We need to be realistic about what kinds of businesses will survive in Kendall Square, but there are definitely voids to be filled and demand to be induced in these crucial categories. MIT might balk at the idea of using any of its hard-won land for something as mundane CVS or a Dunks, but given the current state of Kendall, either of these things would be more useful than a biotech startup incubator, at least until drones start delivering donuts directly into our mouths. And of course, this is conditioned on what ends up arriving as part of the Main Street development. Hopefully MIT follows through on its promise to bring neighborhood essentials to that parcel soon, so there&rsquo;s less need to try to cram <em>everything</em> into Volpe.</p>
<h1 id="4-connect-with-the-rest-of-cambridge">4. Connect with the rest of Cambridge</h1>
<p>This is a subject that I want to broach carefully, because I haven&rsquo;t lived in Cambridge very long and I can&rsquo;t speak to how MIT&rsquo;s relationship with its host city is perceived by residents near the Institute<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:2-Presumably-the"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:2-Presumably-the">2</a></sup>. However, my perception is that Kendall Square is a bit of a bubble that blends poorly into the neighboring areas, which are mostly single family housing and have a working-class history. Given that there is public housing abutting some of the newer biotech buildings, wealth inequality is the obvious elephant in this room, but this seems like an issue that cuts across class to some extent; for poor and well-to-do Cantabridgians alike, there aren&rsquo;t all that many reasons to wander into Kendall Square if you don&rsquo;t work there.</p>
<p>Between real estate tax revenue and &ldquo;payment in lieu of taxes&rdquo; (PILOT), MIT <a href="http://web.mit.edu/facts/community.html">contributes about $50 million</a> back to Cambridge&rsquo;s coffers each year, so its relationship with the city can be called symbiotic, not parasitic. But as it takes a more active role in shaping the city&rsquo;s fate, MIT must also accept some increased responsibility for the goodwill of all of its residents. Its quest to turn Kendall into something resembling a neighborhood will eventually lead it to grapple with tough questions about who it wants to attract to Kendall Square and for what reasons. My opinion is that this is a great opportunity to bring Cambridge into Kendall, and Kendall into Cambridge. Simply installing staples like a grocery store will have this effect, but MIT has never been about doing the bare minimum.<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:3-Though-my-tran"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:3-Though-my-tran">3</a></sup> Is there more we can do?</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PuOfncGJuZ8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p>Points for everyone who guessed &ldquo;yes&rdquo; on that one. For instance, MIT is pretty big into educational outreach &mdash; so much so that they created tools like <a href="https://ocw.mit.edu">OCW</a> and <a href="https://edx.mit.edu">EdX</a> to spread knowledge over the internet. If MIT opened a community education center in Kendall Square, it would simply be taking this tradition to the local level. Imagine MIT students and residents of the area coming together to teach and learn classes on astronomy, woodworking, electronics, apiary, hacky sack, whatever. There&rsquo;s <a href="https://esp.mit.edu/">some</a> <a href="http://mitdynamit.weebly.com/">precedent</a> <a href="http://http://scioly.mit.edu/">to</a> <a href="http://amphibious.mit.edu/">show</a> that MIT students are more than willing to teach things for free (a bunch of know-it-alls, really) and I suspect <a href="http://math.mit.edu/directory/profile.php?pid=144">some of the professors</a> would get in on the fun. Offering a community-run makerspace, after-school tutoring, and a place for lectures open to everyone would be a fantastic way for MIT to ~give back to the community~ and perhaps get Kendall techies and longtime Cambridge residents to mingle a little. Hey, how cool would it be if MIT built a magnet school for local middle/high school students? This could be another place where MIT flexes its innovative muscle, using cutting-edge teaching techniques and <a href="http://khanlabschool.org/">running cruel experiments in mastery-based learning and formative assessment</a>. Or they could just <a href="http://www.universalhub.com/2016/hundreds-bps-students-walk-out-protest-school">hire competent teachers and spend enough money to actually buy school supplies</a>. MIT isn&rsquo;t going to look here to recoup its investment (though it would probably produce a good crop of applicants every year) but it would create a stepping-stone for local students for whom MIT is simultaneously next door and a world away. Plus, it would be a nice thank-you gift to the city that has let us install some <a href="http://web.mit.edu/facilities/construction/completed/stata.html">seriously ridiculous buildings</a> on prime real estate over the past century.</p>
<h1 id="5-think-beyond-the-red-line">5. Think beyond the Red Line</h1>
<p>As if I can go ten paragraphs without mentioning transit. A big factor in Kendall&rsquo;s growing pains is major overcrowding on the Red Line &ndash; trains are regularly <a href="https://www.cambridgema.gov/~/media/Files/CDD/Transportation/transitcommittee/2015/transit_cmte_MITRedLine_Pres_20151007_2.pdf?la=en">at or over capacity</a> in peak direction at rush hour. So growing Kendall is a double-edged sword, since every new resident and employee in the neighborhood puts strain on its already maxed-out heavy rail link. In the long term, Kendall is going to need another rapid transit line to take stress off the Red Line &ndash; the most likely candidate is a BRT or LRT line replacing the Grand Junction freight tracks, but that&rsquo;s at least a few decades out.<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:4-And-arguably-n"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:4-And-arguably-n">4</a></sup> In the meantime, before MIT builds anything on top of the Volpe site, it should think carefully about what it can put <em>underneath</em> it.</p>
<p>I haven&rsquo;t exactly run the numbers on this<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:5-Unresearched-a"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:5-Unresearched-a">5</a></sup>, but an underground bus terminus with a ramp leading onto Broadway might be a useful thing to have in Kendall Square, which is currently serviced by the <a href="http://www.mbta.com/schedules_and_maps/bus/routes/?route=64">64</a>, <a href="http://www.mbta.com/schedules_and_maps/bus/routes/?route=64">68</a>, <a href="http://www.mbta.com/schedules_and_maps/bus/routes/?route=85">85</a>, and the <a href="http://www.mbta.com/schedules_and_maps/bus/routes/?route=CT2">CT2</a> along with the <a href="http://www.charlesrivertma.org/ezride-shuttle/">EZRide</a> service (free with MIT student ID!) and a whole slew of tour and shuttle buses. A high-amenity heated bus terminal underneath Volpe with a walkway to the Red Line station would increase the neighborhood&rsquo;s capacity for buses and improve the experience of riding the bus to Kendall, in turn increasing the neighborhood&rsquo;s commuter capacity. For instance, a version of the CT2 that ran between Kendall and the Longwood Medical Area with higher frequencies and had all-day service might be a tempting alternative for Longwood-bound commuters taking the Red Line to the Green Line or riding the <a href="https://www.masco.org/lma-shuttles/m2-cambridge-hms">MASCO-operated M2 Longwood shuttle</a>. It would also provide an ideal launching point for an MBTA-operated circulator bus running between Kendall and the soon-to-be-rebuilt Lechmere station, which itself is a major bus hub and will &ldquo;soon&rdquo; be the confluence of the Green Line Extension&rsquo;s two branches. If this bus were run down Third St. or First St. frequently enough, it would be a useful connection between Kendall Square and East Cambridge/Somerville that will be lacking even after the GLX is complete.</p>
<figure class="img-large">
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/kendall-sketch.png" alt="A possible(?) footprint of an undergound Kendall bus terminal" />
<figcaption>
<p>
A possible(?) footprint of an undergound Kendall bus terminal
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What&rsquo;s more, new access points to the Kendall station north of Broadway would extend the walkshed and overall influence of the station on the area. To give one example, a marked Red Line entrance on the northeast corner of the Volpe parcel would roughly half the outdoor walk distance to the IBM building on Binney St; another entrance on the southwest side would do the same for Akamai. Because the Kendall station is located on the southern extreme of what we think of as Kendall Square, the area feels dreadfully underserved by transit; moving the epicenter of the station complex would change that while improving many people&rsquo;s walking commutes.</p>
<p>Finally, the day will come when we need to build another rail line into Kendall Square<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:6-Actually-it-s"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:6-Actually-it-s">6</a></sup>. Will it be a Green Line branch along the Grand Junction with an insertion into Lechmere? A deep-bore Blue Line extension into Cambridgeport? We just don&rsquo;t know where our needs or indeed tunneling technology will be in a decade or two when the political will comes trundling along, but I&rsquo;m willing to bet we&rsquo;ll be happy to have pre-excavated 1,000 ft or so of underground right-of-way parallel to the existing Red Line station.</p>
<h1 id="6-build-upwards">6. Build upwards</h1>
<p>While we&rsquo;re all singing Kumbaya over here, MIT is scratching its head trying to figure out how to make its $750 million back. The great thing about the Kendall area is that it&rsquo;s one of the few places in the Boston area deemed far enough from Logan Airport for the FAA to permit a 1,000 foot tall building. This is a world of difference from the current Cambridge zoning restriction that caps it around 300 feet, so I doubt that this is on MIT&rsquo;s list of serious alternatives, and it probably shouldn&rsquo;t be. A skyscraper megaproject would preclude a lot of more incremental work that could be done on the parcel and totally obliviate the Red Line&rsquo;s ability to handle Kendall Square&rsquo;s traffic, essentially tying the project to a commitment from the MBTA and MassDOT for a new rail line through Kendall.</p>
<figure >
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/good-one.gif" />
</figure>
<p>Still, though&hellip;the ability to build tall in Kendall is tempting, not just because tall buildings are cool but because we can put a lot more cool things in them, like grocery stores and makerspaces and housing and presumably a few penthouses for absent Saudi oil barons to recoup the cost. Since MIT has to replace the current Volpe building for the feds before doing anything else, we have some time to think about this, and I hope when the time comes to present a master plan it will include the new tallest building in Cambridge, maybe somewhere in the neighborhood of 500-600 feet.</p>
<p>All of this is a lot to ask, but I know the Institute is up to the task of building Kendall forwards and upwards while also embracing its humanity. Since this is a listicle about MIT, items 7-10 are left as an exercise for the reader. Thanks for stopping by!</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1-I-am-being-tol">[1] I am being told I have to say &ldquo;pedestrian throughway&rdquo; here or my urbanist card will be revoked <a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:1-I-am-being-tol"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
<li id="fn:2-Presumably-the">[2] Presumably they&rsquo;re just happy that the synths mostly mind their own business. <a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:2-Presumably-the"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
<li id="fn:3-Though-my-tran">[3] Though my transcript might suggest otherwise <a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:3-Though-my-tran"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
<li id="fn:4-And-arguably-n">[4] &hellip;And arguably needs the North-South Rail Link to happen first so the MBTA and freight carriers have a replacement link between Boston&rsquo;s north and south sides. Yeesh. <a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:4-And-arguably-n"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
<li id="fn:5-Unresearched-a">[5] Unresearched assertions are the new black! <a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:5-Unresearched-a"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
<li id="fn:6-Actually-it-s">[6] Actually it&rsquo;s come already, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ <a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:6-Actually-it-s"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
</ol>
</div>
Are transit networks strong-link or weak-link systems?http://yelling-at-trains.org/post/strong-weak-transit/
Thu, 22 Dec 2016 16:33:44 -0600http://yelling-at-trains.org/post/strong-weak-transit/
<p>Do the people who plan your city&rsquo;s transit system watch basketball or soccer? It&rsquo;s a question that probably doesn&rsquo;t come up much at community feedback meetings, and yet when we look at the way money is spent on transit in America, it might be wise to pause for a second and consider what sports metaphors are rattling around the brains of the planning community.<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:1"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> On the surface, basketball and soccer may appear to be just two variants of sportsball, in which a group of people work hard to put some kind of ball in some kind of net more times than their opponent. And yet because of the geometry of each game is so different, building a winning team means different things for each sport.</p>
<p>Malcolm Gladwell discusses the difference on his <a href="http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-million"><em>Revisionist History</em> podcast</a> by introducing dichotomy between what he calls &ldquo;strong-link&rdquo; and &ldquo;weak-link&rdquo; systems. Basketball is a strong-link system because the performance of a team can depend mostly on its superstar players, who can singlehandedly dominate the court. Soccer, by contrast, is weak-link, and the success or failure of a soccer team lies with its <em>weakest</em> players. While a basketball court is compact enough that players can and regularly do score points on a drive without assistance from their teammates<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:2"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup>, the size of a soccer field dictates that most goals are preceded by a half-dozen well-executed passes getting someone in position to score, and <em>every</em> player needs to be able to competently fight for their own swathe of the field &ndash; one weak link is enough to break an offense.</p>
<figure >
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/space-jam.gif" alt="Pictured: the source of most of my basketball knowledge" />
<figcaption>
<p>
Pictured: the source of most of my basketball knowledge
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While I am not here to seriously defend Gladwell&rsquo;s analysis of sports, I do think the notion of strong-link and weak-link systems gives us an interesting lens through which to examine transit systems and the decisions made when planning them. In particular, I believe we are trying to build strong-link systems in places better served by weak-link thinking; if you allow me to stretch my metaphor right up to the breaking point, we are setting Steph Curry and a rec-league basketball team loose on a soccer field. This will mostly be a defense of weak-link thinking in transit, but not to the utter exclusion of strong links. Instead, as we will see, there is a time and a place for both, and successful transit planning hinges on knowing what kind of system to build in your time and place.</p>
<p>To shoehorn transit systems into the strong/weak link analogy, consider why different services or lines in a transit network are less or more effective, and how they interact &mdash; soccer players pass the ball around, transit services pass passengers around. As a baseline, I&rsquo;m picking metrics that are pretty central to accepted wisdom about transit but I invite you to BYOM, as it were:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Frequency:</strong> how long do you usually have to wait to get a ride?</li>
<li><strong>Capacity:</strong> how many people can we fit through this route per unit time?</li>
<li><strong>Speed:</strong> how fast do routes in the system run, and how do they compare to other available modes?</li>
<li><strong>Transfer quality:</strong> how many transfers must one make to complete a trip in the system? Are transfers haphazard or coordinated, seamless or nerve-wracking?</li>
<li><strong>Amenities:</strong> how clean, safe, and overall nice is the system to use? What information about the system is available and in what form? What concessions does it make to people with disabilities?</li>
<li><strong>Coverage:</strong> what fraction of the people in a region have access to the transit system, conditioned on the frequency, throughput, and speed of the coverage the service they can access? Humoring me for a second, given <span class="katex">P(\vec{d})</span> and <span class="katex">Q(\vec{d})</span> which describe the population and quality of service, respectively, at location <span class="katex">\vec{d}</span>, what is <span class="katex">\iint P(\vec{d})Q(\vec{d}) dA</span> over the whole system?</li>
</ul>
<p>With these metrics in mind, let&rsquo;s imagine that we are allocated a limited amount of money to make improvements to an existing system (shouldn&rsquo;t be hard), and we are to approach its design from both a strong-link and weak-link perspective. How would the planning process differ?</p>
<p><strong>To build a strong-link system</strong>, the planning community would amass huge amounts of capital in providing top-tier service on a few select routes. No expense would be spared in making this service high-capacity, frequent, and fast. These routes would also use the best vehicles and large, amenity-rich stations. We might be generous in assuming that the planners pick some really good routes to focus on, but even so it is inevitable that this concentration of effort will be of little benefit to most people who use the system. While a lucky few riders speed in and out of the city on gleaming light rail trains, an unfortunate many find that there is nothing left in the budget to run an extra bus or two down their corridor during peak hours, or replace barren where-is-the-bus-don&rsquo;t-ask-me-I&rsquo;m-just-a-sign bus stops with safe, warm, and informative bus shelters. In short, the overall coverage of the system suffers. <em>A strong-link system is built for people unlikely to need to transfer</em> because the transfer from a high-quality to a low-quality service will be drastic enough to bring down the overall experience of using the system, and fewer people will use it.</p>
<figure >
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/strong-link-system.png" alt="A strong-link system concentrates most of its resources into a few lines, resulting in weak connectivity between almost all destination pairs." />
<figcaption>
<p>
A strong-link system concentrates most of its resources into a few lines, resulting in weak connectivity between almost all destination pairs.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>To build a weak-link system</strong>, it&rsquo;s important to make sure that even the lower-quality services meet some level of human decency, or the system won&rsquo;t be able to function for anyone. This might be because the planners recognize that the kinds of trips good transit supports (commuting, errands, recreation, being unable to slow down because there&rsquo;s a bomb under the bus) require strong transfers and good coverage that supports a wide range of destinations. In contrast to a strong-link system, therefore, such a system needs to be able to bring people to many different areas of the city, often using more than one vehicle per trip. In practice, this might look like incremental and across-the-board improvements to the city&rsquo;s bus network &mdash; <a href="http://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/01/04/ridership-on-the-upswing-after-houstons-bus-network-redesign/">defining more sensible routes</a>, increasing frequency, and making modest amenity improvements, like adding small heated shelters with real-time information to stops. The bus isn&rsquo;t rapid transit and it will probably never feel that way, but by clearly demarcating stops, improving frequency, and chipping away at travel time with signal priority and smart stop placement, we can afford to make pretty much everyone&rsquo;s transit experience a bit better, especially those who actually rely on transit to get around.</p>
<figure >
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/weak-link-system.png" alt="A weak-link system has few standouts, but provides reasonable service with strong transfers between many destinations." />
<figcaption>
<p>
A weak-link system has few standouts, but provides reasonable service with strong transfers between many destinations.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2 id="this-could-be-us-but-you-playin">This could be us but you playin</h2>
<p>Okay, confession time &mdash; I am not entirely speaking in hypotheticals here. The dichotomy between strong-link and weak-link, to me, perfectly captures the difference between the transit system Metro Transit in the Twin Cities is building versus the one I believe it should. To be precise, the majority of the capital expenditure on transit in the region between 2014 and 2024 will be on building two light-rail lines which bypass dense and transit-dependent parts of Minneapolis in a mad dash to carry commuters in and out of the deep suburbs. Others, especially on <a href="https://streets.mn">streets.mn</a>, have been beating this drum <a href="https://streets.mn/2013/10/22/a-simplecomplicated-solution-to-the-southwest-corridor-situation/">loudly</a> and <a href="https://streets.mn/2014/08/08/a-southwest-light-rail-explainer/">much more skillfully</a> for some time, but it suffices to say that although we are pouring large amounts of money into these projects, they are unlikely to serve the prime function of rapid transit, which is to move lots of people on all different types of trips, in a way that provides a new mobility alternative. We are building the strong-link system incarnate.<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:3"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:3">3</a></sup></p>
<figure>
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/oh-no-swlrt.png"/>
<figcaption>
A nuanced critique of the Southwest LRT routing, with apologies to <a href='https://www.facebook.com/webcomicname/'>Webcomic Name</a> and I guess to the <a href="https://metrocouncil.org/">Met Council</a>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A weak-link perspective on what Metro Transit could be is encapsulated in the <a href="https://www.metrotransit.org/abrt">arterial bus rapid transit</a> (aBRT) plan, which calls for modestly upgraded bus service on key corridors throughout the Twin Cities. This year the first of our hopefully many aBRT services opened along Snelling Avenue. Branded the A Line, it connects both light rail lines and provides ten-minute frequencies throughout the day. Ridership on this corridor is up 35% over last year, and it&rsquo;s not hard to see why. We now have clearly demarcated stops with updated information about bus arrivals, pay-on-platform, and heating; the buses have signal preemption and (at least for now) a new car smell. Minneapolis-Saint Paul is said to struggle with a strong rail bias; people are much more willing to ride the strongest-link train than a weaker-link bus. I contend that the ridership improvement on Snelling visible just a few months after the A Line opened is proof enough that MSP transit users don&rsquo;t have a rail bias &mdash; we have a bias for reliable and comfortable service that respects us the way light rail does, even if it doesn&rsquo;t go DING-DING-DING and shine lights in your face when it arrives. aBRT is how the bus should be everywhere, and it turns out we can probably build a ton of it for about $325 million<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:4"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:4">4</a></sup> which is <a href="https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2015/07/341-million-easy-way-how-southwest-light-rail-sort-got-its-budget-back-track">about as much money as it costs to pick your nose arguing about bridges for a year</a> instead of building light rail. Basically, we&rsquo;d net the same number of new riders<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:5"><a rel="footnote" href="#fn:5">5</a></sup> as either of our high-profile light rail projects for a fraction of the cost, and build a bunch of highly-visible bus infrastructure in our urban core.</p>
<figure >
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/abrt-composite.png" alt="Left, a ton of aBRT, running right through the most urbanized parts of the Twin Cities. Right, an A Line stop near my house." />
<figcaption>
<p>
Left, a ton of aBRT, running right through the most urbanized parts of the Twin Cities. Right, an A Line stop near my house.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2 id="what-about-strong-links">What about strong links?</h2>
<p>Even as it strives to cast a wide net, a weak-link system need not be egalitarian to a fault. There are always going to be corridors that serve more people and deserve more attention, and these should be identified and prioritized. Nor does starting with a weak-link mindset preclude building rapid transit &ndash; in fact, there is probably a stronger case to be made to the public for rapid transit when they already see the regular old buses serving people effectively all around the region than by asking taxpayers to cough up a few billion to squeeze latent demand out of the deep suburbs. For sustained and worthwhile investment in rapid transit, we first need a populace that sees the value in transit at all, and that means upgrading our bus network to first-world levels of service.</p>
<p>But are there scenarios when it makes sense to take a truly strong-link perspective as a transit advocate? In other words, could it ever do more good to spend a fixed sum on a single corridor instead of spreading it out into the network at large? We rarely get to confront this question directly because of the complex nature of transit funding; with money pouring in from municipal, state, and federal levels and siloed into the budgets for specific projects, the choice is all too often &ldquo;this or nothing&rdquo; instead of &ldquo;this or that&rdquo;. Still, I think there are times when advocating for a strong link makes sense, especially as dictated by geography.</p>
<p>Some cities have highly linear density. Chicago butts right up against Lake Michigan with its downtown area and many universities and landmarks within a few blocks of the waterfront. This means that the north-south Red Line is an absolute workhorse for the city &mdash; I know car-less residents who almost never have to use any other transit service in the city because it is so convenient. The Island Line in Hong Kong also serves a similar purpose for Hong Kong Island (which is by no means the entire city). Others still have a single geographic bottleneck that must be overcome, and the system depends on the existence of a link through that bottleneck. The Transbay Tube between SF and Oakland, and perhaps someday <a href="http://www.sfexaminer.com/think-tank-calls-for-second-bart-transbay-tube/">Transbay Tube II: Electric Boogaloo</a>, come to mind. These examples should be the guiding light for those fighting the good fight for single strong-link improvements like the cancelled <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bs-md-hogan-transportation-20150624-story.html">Red Line in Baltimore</a> (RIP) and the <a href="http://www.northsouthraillink.org/">North-South Rail Link</a> in Boston (pls). These are super worthwhile projects, and their advocates should (and largely do) seek to show the public the degree to which they can singlehandedly take the region&rsquo;s transit infrastructure to another level.</p>
<figure >
<img src="http://yelling-at-trains.org/images/baltimore-red-line.jpg" alt="The ill-fated Baltimore Red Line, which was rejected by Governor Larry Hogan in 2015. Since our president-elect is a fan of infrastructure and the &#39;inner cities&#39; I am sure this one will be fast-tracked by the FTA any day now." />
<figcaption>
<p>
The ill-fated Baltimore Red Line, which was rejected by Governor Larry Hogan in 2015. Since our president-elect is a fan of infrastructure and the &#39;inner cities&#39; I am sure this one will be fast-tracked by the FTA any day now.
</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The key point is that strong-link planning seems to be most effective in areas that are compact and dense &ndash; basketball courts, not soccer fields. We&rsquo;ve seen time and time again in the United States that building a single high-quality rail line (or even several as Dallas has) through an otherwise car-dependent area will do little to change its urban fabric. Instead, I believe traditionally car-oriented cities should seek to quietly and incrementally improve the weak transit services they already have, building ridership as well as consciousness around transit even among those who don&rsquo;t regularly use it. Appeasing the cruel mistress of transit funding often requires cohesive messaging and coalition-building, so these efforts need to be coordinated and branded under a single name as Metro Transit has done with aBRT. This unglamorous work will be rewarded when the time comes to start upgrading corridors to rapid transit, and planners and riders alike find that even a single LRT line can benefit from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect">network effect</a> of existing, reliable bus transfers rather than attempting to shoulder the region&rsquo;s transit hopes on its own.</p>
<p>In <em>Miracle</em>, my favorite sports movie that is secretly an analogy for sound transit planning, coach Herb Brooks begs one of his star players not to try carrying the puck &ldquo;coast to coast&rdquo; and scoring on his own &mdash; it&rsquo;s a strategy that won&rsquo;t work against the laser-focused teamwork of the Russian side. It&rsquo;s only when the team strengthens their passing and formation fundamentals and galvanizes the link between every player on the ice that they begin to make progress. Building good transit in an auto-centric American city can feel like going up against the USSR in Olympic hockey, but the winning strategy is the same &mdash; build the team, not the players, one pass at a time.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">If the <a href="http://www.mnrides.org/">CTIB</a> in the Twin Cities are Timberwolves fans it&rsquo;s possible they&rsquo;re doing the whole thing out of spite 🤔
<a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:1"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
<li id="fn:2">I know this because have first-hand experience as that teammate.
<a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:2"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
<li id="fn:3">Ridership metrics may also mask some troubling realities of strong-link planning. If SWLRT does well (and I kind of expect it will) we will see 30-40k new riders introduced into the MT system because we spent $2bn wooing them out of their cars in suburbia. This 30-40k might be a significant fraction of the system&rsquo;s overall ridership, and it looks so great on paper that it&rsquo;s easy to lose track of the fact that this $2bn did basically nothing for the existing riders who may be heavily dependent on transit or at least much more committed to using it.
<a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:3"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
<li id="fn:4">Summing the cost estimates <a href="https://www.metrotransit.org/Data/Sites/1/media/pdfs/atcs/ATCS%20Final%20Report.pdf">here</a> for the ten recommended corridors. Apply padding if you want, but the A Line was actually on budget.
<a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:4"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
<li id="fn:5">I arrived at a first-order approximation of this number by summing the <a href="https://streets.mn/2015/01/28/chart-of-the-day-top-10-metro-transit-bus-routes-by-ridership-2014/">ridership of the busiest ten MT bus routes</a> and assuming the 35% same ridership increase the A Line has seen in six months of operation. This matches closely with the estimates given by Metro Transit <a href="https://www.metrotransit.org/Data/Sites/1/media/pdfs/atcs/ATCS%20Final%20Report.pdf">here</a>, and I will assert that given time and the network effect, a full-build aBRT system would bring closer to 50-60k marginal riders into the system.
<a class="footnote-return" href="#fnref:5"><sup>[return]</sup></a></li>
</ol>
</div>
What is the meaning of this?http://yelling-at-trains.org/post/what-is-this/
Wed, 21 Dec 2016 21:04:05 -0600http://yelling-at-trains.org/post/what-is-this/<p>For a long time I have been very vocal about transportation issues to my very forgiving friends and family. I&rsquo;ve decided that rather than subject them to this madness directly I should start a blog &ndash; this will also serve to help me practice writing clearly and organize my thoughts. I suspect this blog will mostly stay related to transit and urbanism since I spent so much time on the wonderful graphic in the header, but we&rsquo;ll see what becomes of it. Welcome aboard!</p>